Relative or Absolute URLS The SEO Secure Answer
- 29th Aug 2008
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- SEO
Site maintenance may well be made easier by using relative URLS and indeed transferring the domain is easier than if you absolute URLS too. Whilst the absolute URL method may take more time in terms of updating links on each page the reasons for its usage are strong.
Google for one may well miss some relative links, but from an seo point of view and security absolute URLs win hands down. Absolute URLS are much more secure when implementing a CMS change and less succeptable to hijacking.
Stick with the complete address, giving an entire path to the file is the way to go when possible.
3 Comments | Leave a comment »
It’s probably better to use a variable for the full domain? Easy maintenance, handy when moving to another domain and you have absolute URIs everywhere.
For instance in PHP:
$Domain = “http://www.domain.com/”;
I agree 100% but there is another side benefit of absolute links. When the shady people out there steal your website design/content (as they inevitably will do) they usually lack the attention to detail that someone would have if they had actually developed a first-class website and content in the first place; as a result, they end up leaving your links to your internal pages which then provides more backlinks to your site.
I’m no SEO expert but what empirical data do you have that there is an SEO benefit from using domain URLs?
I understand the security point but I can’t see that GoogleBot could miss any linked URL? Have you done or read any articles that show better indexing via absolute urls. I’m not disagreeing but just a careful adopter of such recommendations and would prefer to base changes in my practices on data rather than a hunch.
On the security thing though, I do agree that this is an issue for some sites with lazy bots/scrapers that don’t fix URLs.
I am not 100% on this also but I think that absolute URLs call to DNS even on the local server vs relative paths that call to the webserver directly which could lead to increased lag.
I think content owners will need to weigh the cost benefit.
Great post.
Cheers,
Jay